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Doing The Right Thing

Cheryl Bentley/SUNCOAST NEWS

A bulletin board in Evelyn Towler's Dunedin home features memorabilia from the Fife and Drum Corps. Towler started the group when she was an elementary school teacher in the Orlando area.

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By Cheryl  Bentley | The Suncoast News

Published: May 3, 2008

Halfway through an interview, Evelyn Towler sighed. "I have a lot to say, but I don't particularly like talking about myself."

But ask her about her passion for teaching and the words exuberantly tumble out.

The 84-year-old Towler has chalked up 38 years in the classroom, teaching everything from kindergarten to college. She fell into teaching almost by accident, she explained, having once wanting to be a journalist.

Previously, she had crisply answered questions about penning two historical novels. One was inspired by the German heritage of her mother and the other was sparked by her father's side of the family, settlers in Concord, Mass., in 1629. The books were published by PublishAmerica.

But she repeatedly brought the subject back to education. It is what she loves, she said, particularly Christian education.

She and businessmen started the nondenominational Lakeland Christian School in Lakeland in 1954.

It began with Towler as principal, three teachers and 19 children in the back of a borrowed church. Today, the K-12 school has a multi-million dollar campus with a new sports field and an impressive music program, she noted.

Her vision for the school was big, even in those days, she remembered, but it had to be sandwiched in with a lot of hard work.

"The dream was there," she noted, "but we didn't have much time to think about it. We were just pounding nails, washing floors and setting up curriculum."

She stayed there for 10 years and then went on to other teaching experiences.

In 1970, she began a 14-year stint at Longwood Elementary School, in the Orlando area, where she discovered her fourth- and fifth-graders didn't like history.

"I love history," Towler said. "I majored in history. I couldn't stand it not being liked."

The rest, as they say, is history. The Fife and Drum Corps was born. It was based on similar groups in the American Revolution.

Her students dressed like American patriots, marched in parades and took field trips to Colonial Williamsburg. At the living history museum in Virginia, the young musicians' forefathers became real to them.

Years later, one of the members of the group who had been involved in the unsuccessful attempt at rescuing American hostages held by students in Iran in 1980 came back to visit his former teacher.

It is a visit Towler still remembers because the former student credited his success in the military to that elementary school Fife and Drum Corps experience. Towler recalls his words. "There, I learned how to be proud of what I did and to excel at anything I do."

Towler was pleased one of her main lessons had taken root. "I kept preaching to the kids you have to do this right, not because you want to be praised, but because it is the right thing to do."

Towler came by her love of education early, as a child growing up in a Dunedin that was little more than a tiny village of orange groves. She learned to read at 4, taught by Kathleen Plumb, then supervisor of Pinellas elementary schools.

Plumb used to eat at the little cafe owned by Towler's mother, Mrs. Wheeler. Towler refused to give her mom's first name because she said people in town knew her only as Mrs. Wheeler.

Her father, L. H. Wheeler, she thinks, was probably the first letter carrier in Dunedin. He had been a Methodist minister but came to Dunedin because of poor health.

"It was the perfect place to grow up in," Towler remembered. "We could climb trees, fish off anyone's dock we wanted to, and wander around with no danger."

Now back in the city of her childhood, the widowed Towler does not regret scrapping her childhood plans of becoming a journalist for teaching.

"I'm grateful for the opportunities I've had in life. I don't guess I'd change anything."

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